Earth Changes

Seven days after recording the UK's top temperature of 28.3C, the north of Scotland yesterday struggled to a daytime low of minus 1.1C amid a blanket of snow.

Cromdale in Speyside had registered the high of the year so far as the country sweltered in the sunniest spring ever. However, just a few miles away yesterday temperatures fell below zero during the day at the Cairngorm mountain range in Inverness-shire.

"Welcome back to winter," said Luke Miall, of the Met Office. "The north of Scotland has been distinctly chilly for the time of year. At the same time as this low temperature was recorded, the wind was blowing at 70mph."

A 12-year-old boy was killed and another injured on Saturday after being attacked by a pack of more than 12 stray dogs in Muzaffarabad.

The boys were shepherding their goats when the dogs pounced on them near a poultry farm on Dera Ghazi Khan Road.

One child, Muhammad Irfan, died by the time a rescue team arrived while the other, Muhammad Akbar, was admitted to DHQ Hospital in critical condition.

According to residents, the poultry farm's workers used to feed dead chickens to the dogs. They hadn't been feeding them lately due to the coronavirus lockdown and the residents believed that might be why the hungry pack might have attacked the boys.

Lightning strikes claimed 36 lives with some injured in different areas of Myanmar in the first five months of this year, an official from the Disaster Management Department said on Saturday.

From January to May this year, 34 incidents of lightning strikes took place in the country's regions and states.

"Five people had been killed in a recent incident of lightning strikes in Myeik city of Tanintharyi region," said Phyu Lei Lei Tun, director of the department under the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement.

Sixteen people were killed and five others injured in separate incidents of lightning in Pabna, Habiganj, Mymensingh, Bogura, Kushtia and Tangail districts on Friday.

In Pabna, four people were killed and a minor boy was injured as they were struck by thunderbolt in different parts of the district.

The deceased were identified as Hashem, 37, son of Laba of Atgharia upazila; Jalil Ali Sardar, 50, son of Rawshan Ali of Sujanagar upazila; Shariful Isalm, 25, son of Yunus Ali of Chatmohar upazila; and Maniruzzaman Moni, 19, of Ataikula upazila.

Of them, three were killed while returning home from croplands while another died while flying kite in the field.

Amanda appeared to wrap up off the coast of Guatemala, but then it moved inland over the country, which is "rare to see ... let alone during late May," Kottlowski said.

"Once Amanda moved inland, the lower-level part of the storm fell apart, but the upper-level part survived and moved to the western Yucatan," Kottlowski said. "Cristobal's development was associated with a large counter-clockwise wind pattern referred to as a gyre. The Central American Gyre (CAG) is more common during the late summer and fall season."

In this instance, the gyre's circulation forced what was left of Amanda to move back over very warm water in the southern Bay of Campeche "and a low-level circulation quickly formed under that upper-level feature," Kottlowski said. "It did not take time - given the 29- to 30-degree-Celsius [mid-80s F] water - to help create thunderstorms, lowering pressure and a coherent low-level circulation which has become Cristobal."

A quarter of Venice has been submerged by a near-record high tide for June, a time of year when such flooding is rare.

The water level in Italy's lagoon city reached 116cm late on Thursday (local time), the third-highest mark for June. That level indicates around 25 per cent of Venice has been flooded.

Venice's sea monitoring agency blamed the unusually high late spring tide on a storm in the Atlantic which brought heavy winds and rain to northern Italy. Another unseasonably high tide is expected on Friday night.

Eyewitnesses have filmed a tornado in the village of Khorly in Ukraine's Kherson region.

A meteorologist of the Kharkiv Regional Center for Hydrometeorology, Ihor Kybalchych, commented on his Facebook page on the photos and video of the vortex.

"A large tornado, probably a waterspout, was spotted by Dmytro Ryzhko in the village of Khorly, Kherson region, on June 3. You can see in the photo that a whirlwind began to form over the water surface and then came out directly on the coast of the Hirkyi Kut peninsula," Kybalchych wrote.